Thursday, November 03, 2011

Life in a crowd-sourced research world

There are popular tropes in current discussions on crowd-sourcing research. There's the "scientists as Mean Girls" view of the current state of affairs. There's the utopian "Let a thousand papers bloom in the open research garden". There's the anti-capitalist "Down with evil money-grubbing publishers", and there's of course the always popular "Everything tastes better with crowd-sourced reputation points and achievement badges".

A more open research environment, where all work is published before review, and anyone is free to comment on any work in public without repercussions, is both valuable as well as more chaotic and unpleasant than we might be ready for.

Consider a pure "publish-then-filter" world, in which you dumped your paper in a public repository that had commenting, reviewing, reputation features, achievement badges and whatever other technological goodies you wanted to throw in.

You'd be in a world not unlike the world that writers and musicians live in today. Since big music/book publishers (read "journals") take a big cut of the royalty revenues ("journal subscriptions") in exchange for promotion/marketing (read "stamps of authenticity"), many authors and musicians have developed smaller but successful brands by going on the road themselves, doing online promotions, cultivating their fan base with special material, downloads, T-shirts, event tickets and what not, and relying on underground word-of-mouth to establish a presence.

Are you ready to do the same ?

It's naive to think that merely putting papers on a repository and waiting for attention to appear will actually work to disseminate your work. Attention is probably the most valuable resource available to us in this connected era, and the one most fiercely fought over by everyone. No one is going to even be able to pay attention to your work unless you promote it extensively, OR unless there are external ways of signalling value.

If you think that reputation mechanisms will help, I will merely ask you to look at the attention garnered by the latest Ke$ha single compared to the attention given to <insert name of your favorite underground-not-selling-out-obscure-indie-band-that-will-set-the-world-on-fire here >.

Secondly, I think as researchers, we would cringe at the kind of explicit promotion that authors/musicians have to indulge in. Would you really want to sell tickets for the "1.46 approximation to graphic TSP paper tour?". How would you afford it ?

There's a third aspect to living in a crowd-sourced research world: a loss of mental space. While it should be clear to anyone who follows my blog/tweets/G+/comments on cstheory that I enjoy the modern networked world, it's also clear to me that actual research requires some distance.

In Anathem, Neal Stephenson describes a monastery of mathematics, where monks do their own research, and at regular intervals (1/10/100/1000 years) open their doors to the "seculars" to reveal their discoveries to the outside world.

Even with collaborations, skype, shared documents and github, you still need time (and space) to think. And in a completely open research environment where everything you post can be commented on by anyone, I can assure you that you'll spend most of your time dealing with comment threads and slashdotting/reditting/HNing (if you're lucky). Are you ready to deploy a 24 hour rapid-response team to deal with the flaming your papers will get ?

Let me be very clear about something. I think there are many academic institutions (journals and conferences especially) that are in desperate need of overhauls and the Internet makes much of this possible. I think it's possible (but I'm less convinced) that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm for doing research, and debates like the ones we are having are extremely important to shape this new paradigm if it comes into being. In that context, I think that what
Timothy Gowers (here and now here) and Noam Nisan (here and here) are trying to do is very constructive: not
just complain about the current state of affairs or defend the status
quo, but try to identify the key things that are good AND bad about our
current system AND find a path to a desired destination.

But human nature doesn't change that quickly. New ways of disseminating, valuing and verifying research will definitely change what's valued and what's not, and can help open up the research enterprise to those who feel the current system isn't working (i.e most of us). But when you replace one evaluation system by another, don't be too sure that the new system is fairer - it might merely change what gets valued (i.e the peaks might change but not the distribution itself)